The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. In order to provide easier or faster information transfer and convenience, telecommunication industry service providers are developing improvements to existing networks. In this regard, for example, improvements are being made to the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN). Further, for example, the evolved-UTRAN (E-UTRAN) is currently being developed. The E-UTRAN, which is also known as Long Term Evolution (LTE), is aimed at upgrading prior technologies by improving efficiency, lowering costs, improving services, making use of new spectrum opportunities, and providing better integration with other open standards.
As a result of improved networking technologies, the capacity for visual and audible media content distribution over the Internet has continued to increase. Users desire efficient and optimized access to this growing amount of media content through various access methods. An emerging standard for distributing media content to devices is known as dynamic adaptive streaming over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) (DASH). The media retrieval process according to DASH may be less efficient when requested media must always be retrieved from an origin server.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide systems, methods, apparatuses, and computer program products for enabling efficient pre-fetching of media in a DASH system.